California’s highly regulated energy industry doesn’t seem like much better alternative?
The '90s deregulation directly led to an 800% increase in wholesale electricity prices in 2000, and rolling blackouts for customers of investor owned utilities like SDGE (San Diego) and PGE (Central/Northern California). The government owned utilities, like LADWP (serving the Los Angeles area) did not need to resort to rolling blackouts (zero blackouts), and currently have much lower rates* while being fully sustained by the rate payers (not having the parasitic "investors" demanding greater profits allows for proper long-term planning and significantly lower prices for the rate payers).
* Average $0.26/kWh LADWP. Average $0.45/kWh PGE
As a consumer, you might buy retail electrical energy, transmission and distribution from an investor owned utility like PG&E, which is regulated by the California Public Utilities Commission.
- Price stability itself has a value for electricity consumers. Insulating consumers from the price variations that come from the inherent variability in supply and demand is a major "feature" of retail electric service. While one could provide their own stability with enough personal batteries and generators, practically that's only really possible for the wealthy.
- Lack of regulation around planning, upkeep, maintenance, and backup planning results in short-term profit maximization among generators (and cost minimization among consumers who enjoy very low electric rates in the short term) leads to situations like the catastrophic Texas outages of 2021. Now that Texas has legislated price-caps (which is direct economic regulation) [1], typical rates will rise.
1. https://www.texastribune.org/2023/05/22/texas-electricity-po...
If you don't like how Texas or California does things there's still plenty of options to choose from.
But yeah, California has problems because it's regulators get stingy. If you control how much maintenance a company can do and cut back how much it should do then don't be surprised when things are poorly maintained.
> When PG&E suggested inspecting 300,000 poles a year to ensure safety in 2012, CPUC cut the total to 235,000.¹¹ In 2011 and 2012, when PG&E spent almost $100 million more on replacing poles than allowed by CPUC, the regulator took that as a reason to deny future claims for pole replacement spending. It said “PG&E demonstrated the capacity and willingness to spend more than previously authorized…to meet service obligations,” thus they would not include extra required pole replacements in the “rate base.” These sorts of decisions created exactly the wrong incentives, penalizing PG&E for doing more than was required.¹²